We were setting the fore upper topgallant sail, which had not been loosed since its getting in, described in his diary. The wind, which for so long had been from something east, had at last something of west in it, and we were giving the ship a little more sail to help her on -- not that the fore upper topgallant sail would make much difference, really, but the psychological effect was not to be scorned.
Walker, with a small boy named Finila, went up to loose the sail. It was a little after 4 o'clock in the morning, the worst time of the day. We had so few in a watch that it was bad to send two men into the rigging; but there were reasons for that. We had coffee at 5:30, and the tradition of the sea is, that if there is any work afoot and it is not finished before the coffee bells, then whatever time is taken up with finishing the work is lost. The coffee hour is not extended merely because some of it has been given up to the ship's work. A good mate will see that his watch receives its coffee time unbroken. 
That was why our second mate sent both Walker and young Finila to loose the fore upper topgallant that fateful morning. It was very securely made fast with many gaskets to stand against the Cape Horn gale. Since it had been made fast it had become sodden with rain and the canvas had swollen. Ice had formed in the gaskets, and any sailor knows it may take an hour to get a sail loose in such conditions. With the two of them at it, they managed in half an hour, and then we on deck -five of us with the second mate- began the painful process of heaving the yard aloft by the capstan.
When it was halfway up, the second mate saw that a gasket was foul on the weather clew. The sail would not hoist properly. He yelled aloft to Walker, through the rain, to go out on the lower topgallant yard to clear the gasket. Walker went and cleared it. He called down to us that everything was clear. We began to heave again. The halyards carried away and the yard came tumbling down. It fell on Walker, beneath it, and killed him there. We did not know that he was dead when we rushed up the mast and found him unconscious between the yards. We thought he was merely senseless. There was no sign of wound, save for some blood oozing slowly from his mouth. It never occurred to us that he was dead; we were too much concerned with bringing him to and getting him to the deck that we might see the extent of his injuries and what we could do about them. I tried to bring him to with cold water that had been brought from the deck. I did not know how hopeless it was. We wanted to restore him to his senses in order that he might help us with the difficult task of getting him, from high on that swaying mast, to the deck. It was not easy to bring a senseless body down that slippery and pitching rigging. But he did not come to. We rigged a gantline and lowered him down, gently, carefully. When we got to the bottom, Captain Svensson took one look. "He is dead," he said. 
We buried him from the poop next day, with the Finnish ensign at half-mast and the crew white-faced and deeply moved. I do not know of anything more moving than sea burial--not the committal of some poor corpse of steerage passenger from high on the steamship's promenade deck, in the dead of night, lest the saloon passengers be put off their dancing for a moment, but the last sad rites over a shipmate's bier in a Cape Horn windjammer.
We all had known him so well. At sea, like that, you see the utmost "innards" of a man--what he is made of. No subterfuges, no pretense of city life, no masking of real intents and real character, will pass here; you see all. We knew poor Walker and we liked him well. And this was his end! The captain read some prayers; we sang Swedish and English hymns. There was a short address. The ship was hove to, sadly wallowing, with the moan of the wind in her rigging now quieted by her deadened way, the surly wash of the sea about her decks now softened. We carried him to the rail, tilted the hatch; there was a dull "plop" and it was over. We put the ship before the wind again and sailed on. It was the 57th day before we came to the Horn. It was June then. We had a gale from the west, and though the sea ran huge and the cold was almost overpowering, the old ship ran on and we were glad. The ship began to leak in the height of a gale; the pumps jammed; the water seeped in, and we could do nothing about it. Through a night of storm and snow-squall fury we were huddled on the poop, not certain that the ship would live to see the morning. 
The next day one of the boys was swept overboard by a big sea, and there were no falls rove off in the lifeboats to try to save him. What could we do? Many had gone like that, and the wind ships could only run on.
But the wind was a little quieter then. We did not run on, although it seemed futile to try to save him. We jammed the wheel hard down and brought her, shivering and groaning, into the wind. We rove off new ropes into the lifeboat tackle blocks with mad speed. One of us was aloft in the mizzen-top, seeing where the floating figure had gone. It was coming on nightfall then, with rain squalls and gale in the offing. We saw he had grasped a life buoy flung to him, and still lived. But for how long? We got the boat over and six volunteers quickly leaped into it, the mate in charge. Nobody was asked to go; nobody hung back. We dropped astern and the boat seemed a futile thing, rising and falling in the big seas. It was queer to see the green bottom of the old ship, when we rose on a crest, lifted almost bodily from the swirling water. When we dropped in a trough her royal yards swept wild arcs through the gray sky, and we saw little else. Soon we could not see her at all, when the boat sank deep in the valleys between the big seas. We had no idea where the boy was. We could not see him. How could we? We could see nothing there, not even the ship. Maybe it was madness to look. The mate, at the steering oar in the stern sheets, swept the sea with his sharp eyes, this way and that. There was a chance we would not find the ship again, if the squall came down heavily and shut her out. That had happened with the Swedish bark Staut, in much the same circumstances. She put out a boat to save a man fallen into the sea from the main yard, and a squall came down and she lost everybody--man overboard, those who went to rescue him, boat and everything. We remembered that. There was nothing in the boat to sustain life. We had thrown the water cask and the bread barrel out to lighten her. Then, in the last moment of light, we saw him. It was a sea miracle, if ever there was one. He was on the crest of a sea, only three seas away from us! We had been on the point of giving up. We lay to heartily and soon had the boy back aboard. We pulled him in over the stern and went back to the ship, which had been watching us and now ran slowly downwind toward us. The boy was unconscious and nearly frozen to death, but he lived. He was among the lucky ones.  Blow on, old gale! We did not mind. We knew that we should quickly come to warmer latitudes and southeast trades, and so to the Line, the northeast trades, the Azores, and home. But we did not count upon too much just now. We took advantage of the Cape Horn currents to pass between the Falklands and the mainland of South America, which is an unusual way for sailing ships. Once past the Horn, we made good progress. It seemed that the Pacific had wreaked the ocean's wrath on us and delivered us to the Atlantic with the gruff greeting: "Here, these dogs have had enough. Treat them well." The second mate went mad with awful suddenness. We had no warning of it. We did not expect anything like that. We knew that he had worried much over Walker's death, since he was officer of the watch. But it was not his fault. It was not anyone's fault. It was just one of those terrible, inexplicable things that are always happening, yet never seem to remove from this earth persons that might well be done without. In the forecastle we worried much, too, but we had each other for company. There is no one more lonely than the sailing ship's officers. We carried only the first mate and second. They rarely were company for each other, for when one had the deck the other slept. The captain, as is the sailor's style, kept himself to himself and spoke to the sail-maker for company. The mates led lonely lives, finding what companionship they could in their own minds. The result was that when something came to unhinge the mind of our second mate, there was none to see how perilously near he was to breaking down. Nobody noticed until it was too late. We had an awful time with him. About that I would rather have little to say. It was not his fault, poor devil. We were all very sorry for him. We had to keep constant watch on him for the rest of the voyage lest he do himself harm. He tried to kill himself three times. It was very worrying. We tried to make for Cape Town to put him aboard some steamer we should see there in the shipping lanes, but the wind changed and we could not make Cape Town. We saw no other ships. We were 104 days at sea before we saw the sign of a steamer, and then it was only a smudge of smoke on the horizon. The sailing ship goes her own way about the world, far from the shipping lanes and away front the busy routes of the steamers. She may see other sailing ships, but rarely, until she reaches the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic, anything of steamers. We found the southeast trades in 30 degrees south and stood up for the Line. Now the days were pleasant and the sun shone, and flying fish leaped in fear from the bone of foam under our forefoot. Bonito came and played about and we saw some whales. One whale stayed with us for three days. He was not frightened. We had no screw nor honking engines to frighten him away. He played about us merrily, and, when I tried to photograph him, blew his spray on the lens. On the 100th day we came to the Line. Here it fell calm and we made little progress. We were lucky, though. Once I spent three weeks in the Atlantic doldrums in a big four-master bound from Melbourne to St. Nazaire. In the Grace Harwar we were becalmed only four days, which was nothing. Then the wind came again and we sneaked slowly on. By then the ship was very foul. Her top speed, with a strong wind, was little more than seven knots, though really she is a well-lined vessel, capable of twelve knots and more in favorable conditions. But she had not been in a dry dock for more than two years and her bottom was very foul. She had lain long months at anchorages on West Coast ports and at Lüderitz Bay, in South West Africa. There are no places worse for fouling ships, and fouled ships cannot sail. Being a Scotchman, she did not have much food to spare. Being a Scotchman, she gave us all she had. The name of the Orangeleof was blessed among us. She gave us cases of bully beef, half a cow from her refrigerator, a case of milk, flour, and fresh vegetables, together with a sack of sugar and some other things. She gave us tobacco, but it was real strong sea stuff, plugs, and our young boys were too young to be used to such stuff and could not smoke it. That is a pretty good illustration of the difference between the present-day sailing ships and the old. From Cobh we towed round to Glasgow, and there I left. No one in the ship went back in her. Another crew of young boys came across from Finland, sent by the owner there, and with them a young man as master who had been together with me in the Lawhill, as able seaman, eight years before. The grain was discharged, the ship went down to the Bristol Channel and loaded coal for La Guaira, in Venezuela. She reached that port after a wild passage of some 45 days, intending then to go on through Panama to Peru for guano, or across the South Atlantic, and so to Australia, for grain. But world freight markets collapsed, and all that she could do was to return again to Maarianhamina in ballast, there to lay up at anchorage with only a watchman aboard, to await an upward trend in Australian grain freights or a good offer from the break-up yards--and the end.
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